Kiel

Kiel points north like the prow of a ship, and every June it becomes the capital of world sailing: Kiel Week, the largest sailing event on earth, fills the fjord with thousands of boats — Olympic classes to windjammers — and the city with three million visitors, concerts on every quay and the great parade of tall ships as its climax. The sea made Kiel in every sense: Schleswig-Holstein's capital guards the Baltic end of the Kiel Canal, the world's busiest artificial waterway, whose locks at Holtenau let ocean giants shortcut Jutland, watched by strollers with ice cream.

History gave the naval city one revolutionary hour: in November 1918 Kiel's sailors refused to steam out for a final hopeless battle, and their mutiny lit the German Revolution — within days the empire fell and the republic was proclaimed. The city remembers the sailors' councils as democracy's rough midwives.

Wartime destruction and utilitarian rebuilding gave Kiel a plain face but not a plain life: the fjord promenades, the beaches at Laboe with the naval memorial, ferries to Scandinavia leaving from the city centre, and handball evenings when the THW "Zebras", record German champions, turn the arena white and black. The opera house on the Kleiner Kiel pond and the Kiel Philharmonic sustain a proper capital's season — with the gulls providing unpaid chorus.